G-CLoud partners announced

G-CLoud partners announced

Award-winning British cloud provider, Memset®, today awarded a Framework Agreement for the provision of G-Cloud Services, says large system integrators are starting to lose their hold on government contracts as the G-Cloud partners are announced.

One of the visions of G-Cloud is for 25% of contracts to be awarded to SMEs. Memset are delighted to see that the government appear to be trying to make good on their 25% promise, with a significant amount of SMEs named in the approved list announced by the cabinet office today.

Kate Craig-Wood, MD of Memset said: “G-Cloud has the potential to be enormously disruptive. It heralds the breaking of large systems integrators' strangle-hold over government ICT. In my view as tax-paying technology expert their consultancy-lead, bridge-building approach has historically delivered remarkably poor value to government.”

By gaining the Framework Agreement for the provision of G-Cloud services Memset are one step closer to helping the government realise the enormous savings to be gained by switching across to a pay-as-you-go type arrangement for infrastructure and/or software. This is exemplified by Memset's stated intent to offer their services at the same prices that they normally charge customers (publicly available on their Web site), which at present are the lowest in the UK for virtual machines and cloud storage.

The next step for the IaaS cloud provider is to go through the CESG Pan Government Accreditor's accreditation process. Following earlier scoping meetings, Memset are confident that they will be able to host services and content up to Impact Level 2; that requires ISO27001 with some extensions that Memset believe they already have in place whereas IL1 is mainly based on just ISO27001.

As a very security-oriented company, Memset had already gone well-beyond the requirements of ISO 27001, so gaining the G-Cloud framework agreement was less work than what they usually have to put into just one tender for a local council project.

“Gaining our approved G-Cloud Framework Agreement is incredibly exciting for us. As one of a new breed of government ICT supplier we sincerely intend to work with government to delivery better quality, secure and environmentally friendly ICT services at vastly lower prices than those to which they are accustomed.” concluded Craig-Wood.